05w47:1 Darren O'Donnell on kids in politics Posted November 23rd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 47 number 1 (Darren O’Donnell on kids in politics) Thanks to Darren for allowing me to host his essay from the recently released uTOpia (Coach House Press) on Goodreads – Timothy ——————————————————————— Toronto the teenager: why we need a Children’s Council | Darren O’Donnell http://goodreads.ca/darrenodonnell/ “If you’re searching for utopia, you need look no further than the kids. The beautiful thing about focusing on youth is that while we may not be kids now, we all were once. And we carry the somatic memory of those days into almost every encounter; we all share, to some degree or other, a visceral understanding of powerlessness. Barring children from full political participation not only makes no sense when we consider the rights of the child, but also when we take into account the greater good. Excluding a huge segment of the population – a segment in the midst of forming views and attitudes that shape their behaviour for the rest of their lives – is a narrow-minded act that can only serve to limit our own possibilities as adults. So, while this proposal is for the children, it’s truly benefit of who those children become, for the adults who have to deal with results of eighteen years of their own political disenfranchisement.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 23 November 2005 @ 10:31 PM
05w46:1 Modern Times Posted November 15th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 46 number 1 (modern times) ——————————————————————— We Now Live in a Fascist State | Lewis H. Lapham http://organicconsumers.org/Politics/harpers101205.cfm “We’re Americans; we have the money and the know-how to succeed where Hitler failed, and history has favored us with advantages not given to the early pioneers. We don’t have to burn any books. The Nazis in the 1930s were forced to waste precious time and money on the inoculation of the German citizenry, too well-educated for its own good, against the infections of impermissible thought. We can count it as a blessing that we don’t bear the burden of an educated citizenry. The systematic destruction of the public-school and library systems over the last thirty years, a program wisely carried out under administrations both Republican and Democratic, protects the market for the sale and distribution of the government’s propaganda posters. The publishing companies can print as many books as will guarantee their profit (books on any and all subjects, some of them even truthful), but to people who don’t know how to read or think, they do as little harm as snowflakes falling on a frozen pond. “ Writers and the Golden Age | Allan Massie http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/pulpit_nov_05.html “Of course, the idea that art necessarily finds expression in protest, or is essentially a means of protesting, whether from the Right or the Left, is itself, comparatively speaking, modern. It dates from the Romantic movement. Before then, much art was a celebration of the established order, and inasmuch as it was critical, the criticism was directed at those who would disturb that order. Satire, for instance, was generally conservative. Its anger and contempt were aroused by folly and the vanity and vices of the present day; the satirist harked back to a (doubtless imaginary) Golden Age. […] The Left, ever since Rousseau, has seen man as essentially good, in chains only on account of the institutions of a cruel and corrupt society. Loosen his chains, strike off his fetters, and the natural benevolence of his nature will be free to flourish. For the Left the Golden Age is still to come. The Right, however, sees our nature as essentially flawed. […]Left-wing artists, however angry, are optimists; right-wing ones, however serene or witty, are pessimists. Yet the same man may be of the Left in his politics, opinions, and daily life, but of the Right in his Art. Graham Greene is a good example: politically on the Left, nevertheless on the Right in the view of man’s nature which informs his novels.” What’s a Modern Girl to Do? | Maureen Dowd http://tinyurl.com/aany5 “‘What I find most disturbing about the 1950’s-ification and retrogression of women’s lives is that it has seeped into the corporate and social culture, where it can do real damage,’ she complains. ‘Otherwise intelligent men, who know women still earn less than men as a rule, say things like: ‘I’ll get the check. You only have girl money.” Throughout the long, dark ages of undisputed patriarchy, women connived to trade beauty and sex for affluence and status. In the first flush of feminism, women offered to pay half the check with ‘woman money’ as a way to show that these crass calculations – that a woman’s worth in society was determined by her looks, that she was an ornament up for sale to the highest bidder – no longer applied. Now dating etiquette has reverted. Young women no longer care about using the check to assert their equality. They care about using it to assess their sexuality. Going Dutch is an archaic feminist relic. Young women talk about it with disbelief and disdain. ‘It’s a scuzzy 70’s thing, like platform shoes on men,’ one told me.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 15 November 2005 @ 11:17 PM
05w45:1 The 2005 Massey Lectures Posted November 7th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 45 number 1 (The 2005 Massey Lectures) The 2005 Massey Lectures begin tonight on CBC Ideas. They can be heard online at 9pm EST from the CBC website’s stream, or via old fashioned radio boxes at 9pm local time across the country on CBC Radio 1. ——————————————————————— Race Against Time: The 2005 Massey Lectures | Stephen Lewis http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey/massey2005.html “‘I have spent the last four years watching people die.’ With these wrenching words, diplomat and humanitarian Stephen Lewis opens his 2005 Massey Lectures. Lewis’s determination to bear witness to the desperate plight of so many in Africa and elsewhere is balanced by his unique, personal, and often searing insider’s perspective on our ongoing failure to help. Lewis recounts how, in 2000, the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York introduced eight Millennium Development Goals, which focused on fundamental issues such as education, health, and cutting poverty in half by 2015. In audacious prose, alive with anecdotes ranging from maddening to hilarious to heartbreaking, Lewis shows why and how the international community is falling desperately short of these goals.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Monday 07 November 2005 @ 4:55 PM
05w44:3 Aux Armes Citoyens! Posted November 2nd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 44 number 3 (aux armes citoyens!) ——————————————————————— Six nights of riots in Paris ghetto split Chirac cabinet | Henry Samuel http://tinyurl.com/cx86n “The French government was reeling yesterday after six nights of rioting which have exposed a split in the cabinet over how to deal with poverty and immigration in the dilapidated Paris suburbs. As authorities cleaned up the debris of another bout of violence, including the wrecks of 250 cars burned out on Tuesday night, both the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, and the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, put off foreign trips to deal with the rioting. ‘We sure showed it to them last night,’ said one youth in Clichy-sous-Bois, a grim suburb of high-rises some 15 miles outside Paris.” The Barbarians at the Gates of Paris | Theodore Dalrymple http://www.city-journal.org/html/12_4_the_barbarians.html “Where does the increase in crime come from? The geographical answer: from the public housing projects that encircle and increasingly besiege every French city or town of any size, Paris especially. In these housing projects lives an immigrant population numbering several million, from North and West Africa mostly, along with their French-born descendants and a smattering of the least successful members of the French working class. From these projects, the excellence of the French public transport system ensures that the most fashionable arrondissements are within easy reach of the most inveterate thief and vandal. Architecturally, the housing projects sprang from the ideas of Le Corbusier, the Swiss totalitarian architect—and still the untouchable hero of architectural education in France—who believed that a house was a machine for living in, that areas of cities should be entirely separated from one another by their function, and that the straight line and the right angle held the key to wisdom, virtue, beauty, and efficiency. “NOTE: article date August 2002 Neither whores nor submissives | Rebecca Hillauer http://www.signandsight.com/features/288.html “Young Muslim women in the working class suburbs of France have two choices: slut or servant. Fadela Amara is trying to offer them a third option: respect. Fadela Amara has a mission. One sees it in the intensity of her eyes and feels it in the passion of her speech. A good two years ago, the daughter of an Algerian immigrant family in Paris, she founded the organisation ‘Ni putes ni soumises’. This is also the title of her book, which won the ‘Prix du Livre Politique’ of the French national assembly last year. In the book, Fadela Amara tells in a simple and direct style the story of her fight against the growing violence and social disintegration in France’s suburbs.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 02 November 2005 @ 11:03 PM
05w40:1 Happy World Posted October 5th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 40 number 1 (happy world) ——————————————————————— A New Measure of Well-Being From a Happy Little Kingdom | Andrew C. Revkin http://tinyurl.com/e2tbm “The gross domestic product, or G.D.P., is routinely used as shorthand for the well-being of a nation. But the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan has been trying out a different idea. In 1972, concerned about the problems afflicting other developing countries that focused only on economic growth, Bhutan’s newly crowned leader, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, decided to make his nation’s priority not its G.D.P. but its G.N.H., or gross national happiness. […] [Recently] about 400 people from more than a dozen countries … gathered … to consider new ways to define and assess prosperity. The meeting, held at St. Francis Xavier University in northern Nova Scotia, was a mix of soft ideals and hard-nosed number crunching. Many participants insisted that the focus on commerce and consumption that dominated the 20th century need not be the norm in the 21st century. Among the attendees were three dozen representatives from Bhutan. […] In Canada, Hans Messinger, the director of industry measures and analysis for Statistics Canada, has been working informally with about 20 other economists and social scientists to develop that country’s first national index of well-being. […] Later this year, the Canadian group plans to release a first attempt at an index – an assessment of community health, living standards and people’s division of time among work, family, voluntarism and other activities. Over the next several years, the team plans to integrate those findings with measurements of education, environmental quality, ‘community vitality’ and the responsiveness of government. Similar initiatives are under way in Australia and New Zealand.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 05 October 2005 @ 2:05 PM
05w36:2 Today's the Day Posted September 11th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 36 number 2 (today’s the day) It being the fourth anniversary of Terrible Tuesday, I felt like I should comment here, since it’s something I’m wont to do anyway. These two articles deal with the USA. The first, published yesterday in the Globe and Mail, (and surprisingly free) is a wonderful summation of all that’s perceived to be wrong with the United States today, dealing with the usual Lefty complaints, but presented in what I think is a fair manner with an intelligence sometimes lacking as we assume everyone agrees with us and knows what were talking about. The intro that the Globe published with it read: ‘9/11/05 The Watery hell in New Orleans shouldn’t have come as such a surprise, argues Paul William Roberts. Decades of oil-driven greed and misguided foreign policy have created a monster at odds with much of the planet and unwilling to take care of its own. The Stars and Stripes forever? Four years after the Twin Towers, it seems the superpower itself is starting to sink’. It is an odd coincidence that the destruction of New Orleans came three weeks before the anniversary of the event which had such a profound impact on our psyches. I remember that day shattering the sense of doom that had been building as I watched North American society carelessly and recklessly consume ever greater amount of non-renewable resources for their urbane trucks, and argue about such irrelevant things as Presidential head, while letting Brittany Spears’ career get off the ground. Then, the event caused a shift, and America went into its war mentally, paranoia growing like mushrooms around the social and ethical rot. Enron, the Iraq war, and then last year’s hope that it might all end in one humiliating defeat we could all get behind. But no, the Christians of the south prayed to their God and re-elected a man whom many in the world regularly compare to Hitler. Which is a characteristic of the hyperbole of our times, and not really accurate – for one thing, Hitler was competent. He had his evil plan and succeeded in replacing the Devil as a figure of evil for the secular age. The prayers of thousands of Muslims was answered in August, a month historically known for terrible things, and suddenly, America is spited upon, and the too-terrible-to-name administration is shown that it can’t do shit, but it can certainly let its citizens wallow in it. So the second article looks back four years to the event and the New York artworld’s response to it with the thoughts of Arthur Danto. And I was prompted to write this lengthy intro by my own memories of finding art in the week after rather irrelevant, but I was haunted then by a quote that I’ve since been unable to track down, stating something to the effect that things like art are really important in times of tragedy to remind us that horrors aren’t the only story with regard to being human. Except this time, with the storm, I find watching CNN (since CBC is locked into a narcissistic drama) to be more compelling than any video art could ever be. As an artist, I find art totally lame right now. Danto hints at this in his article – the professional imagineers of our society cannot in the end imagine something more powerful than reality (and given how I’ve let Goodreads collect that anti-pomo arguments over the past year, I’m tempted to ask here that being disconnected from reality, how could artists not fail in the task?) But everything being as it is has taken the wind out of my sails in many ways – the catastrophe is depressing in that it was allowed to happen, and art is depressing in that it’s rather pathetic. And with the CBC on its perpetual walkabout, there isn’t really any good TV to watch, and the new season of Big Ideas on TVO hasn’t started yet. The usual end of summer blues aggravated by depressing world events … but, four years ago suggested that maybe this a new pattern, and in the end it’s a new addition to the list that prompts one to say c’est la vie. -Timothy ——————————————————————— The flagging empire | Paul William Roberts http://tinyurl.com/bpgyh “In hindsight, the $14-billion price tag on the plan that had been drawn up for saving Louisiana’s coastline and the Mississippi’s delta now must look like a bargain to a Congress that has agreed to $50-billion in aid alone. It is safe to say that relocating more than a million people, along with the loss of the nation’s largest port, and the other economic consequences from Hurricane Katrina will bankrupt the United States. Or would, if anyone dared to call in the country’s debts, which now exceed any number of dollars one can write meaningfully – particularly since no one seems to know just what a trillion is anyway. It’s a known unknown. The unknown part is what happens to a nation that owes this much money: No other one has ever racked up such a tab. Even so, in the eyes of the world, the emperor stands naked. Monday’s issue of London’s The Independent noted: ‘We could be witnessing a significant moment in America. Hurricane Katrina has revealed some uncomfortable truths about the world’s richest and most powerful nation. The catastrophe in New Orleans exposed shocking inequalities – both of wealth and race – and also the relative impotence of the federal authorities when faced with a large-scale disaster. Many Americans are beginning to ask just what sort of country they are living in. There is a sense that the struggle for the soul of America is gathering pace.’ There is also suddenly a sense that the American Empire is in decline, that the only successful wars it has ever waged are the ones against the environment and its own people.” 9/11 Art as a Gloss on Wittgenstein | Arthur C. Danto http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/danto/danto9-9-05.asp “[One of the truths I learned] was that even the most ordinary people respond to tragedy with art. Among many unforgettable experiences of the early aftermath of the event was the unprompted appearance of little shrines in fronts of doors, on windowsills and in public spaces everywhere. By nightfall on 9/11, New York was a complex of vernacular altars. In the course of that terrible day, a reporter had phoned, asking me what the art world was going to do about the attacks. I could not imagine that anyone not practically engaged in coping and helping was able to do anything except sit transfixed in front of the television screen, watching the towers burn, and of the crowds at street level running from danger and, later, trudging through smoke and detritus in search of someone they knew. I thought the last thing on anyone’s mind was art. But by day’s end the city was transformed into a ritual precinct, dense with improvised sites of mourning. I thought at the time that artists, had they tried to do something in response to 9/11, could not have done better than the anonymous shrine-makers who found ways of expressing the common mood and feeling of those days, in ways that everyone instantly understood.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Sunday 11 September 2005 @ 12:07 PM
05w36:1 Katrina Audio and Video Part II Posted September 7th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 36 number 1 (katrina audio and video part II) The destruction of an entire city by a storm is something I never really expected to see. I mean, I’m waiting for the nuclear bomb thing which they keep telling me is on it’s way … as on it’s way as the help that FEMA kept promising Mayor Nagin last week I suppose. Anyway, after the past five years of Bush bullshit that anyone who was paying attention could see through, the maligned ‘Liberals’ suddenly seem vindicated, once again united in a chorus of unsaid, ‘we told you so’. And what gets me is that even the people at Bush’s Broadcasting Co (aka Fox News) have joined in the chorus of criticism. The American media elite are finally as pissed off with the Bush administration and the whole status quo as the rest of the world. So onto this Goodreads – building on the net-famous sample of last weekend, I direct you to the website crooksandliars.com which is running a great roundup and video+audio archive of the reporting from New Orleans, along with some others, including what Kanye West was talking about (on the Metafilter link). – Timothy ——————————————————————— Crooks and Liars http://www.crooksandliars.com/ Highlight1 (Clip from last night’s Daily Show); Highlight 2 (Tim Russert on the Imus Show); Highlight3 (Kanye West clip again, a better one that what I sent outbefore); Highlight4 (Shepard Smith and Geraldo Rivera on Fox News) The Rebellion of the Talking Heads | Jack Shafer http://www.slate.com/id/2125581/ “In the last couple of days, many of the broadcasters reporting from the bowl-shaped toxic waste dump that was once the city of New Orleans have stopped playing the role of wind-swept wet men facing down a big storm to become public advocates for the poor, the displaced, the starving, the dying, and the dead. Last night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper abandoned the old persona to throttle Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., in a live interview. (See the video or read the transcript.)” Black people loot, white people borrow | Metafilter http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44689 Barbara Bush insults Katrina survivors | Metafilter http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/44871 “Barbara Bush insults Katrina survivors. Said today while visiting relief efforts at the Houston Astrodome: ‘Almost everyone I’ve talked to said we’re going to move to Houston. What I’m hearing, which is sort of scary, is they all want to stay in Texas. (Said with concern.) Everybody is so overwhelmed by all the hospitality. And so many of the peoples in the arena here, you know, they’re underprivileged anyway, so this–this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them.’ I’d be curious what she’d think after after living there for just a week, much less for months on end, before being sent off to somewhere even further from their homes, friends, and relatives. Please note: This woman raised our president. Did the acorn fall far from the tree?” NOTE: Audio here via crooksandliars: http://movies.crooksandliars.com/bb.mp3 —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 07 September 2005 @ 9:18 PM
05w35:2 Audio and Video Posted September 3rd, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 35 number 2 (audio and video) ——————————————————————— CNN Weatherman | CNN http://retrospection.net/videofiles/hurricanekat.php “‘But Chad … Chad … Chad … translate that for us, I don’t understand!'”From: Mon 30 August 2005 4:30am EST Interview with Mayor Ray Nagin | WWL-AM http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/ray_nagin_20050901.mp3 “‘Put a moratorium on press conferences …. don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here! They’re not here! It’s too dogone late. Now get off your asses and let’s do something, and let’s fix the biggest godamn crisis in the history of this country!'”From: Thursday 1 September 2005, 14:05min The Kanye West Quote | Kanye West http://media.putfile.com/Kanye79 “‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people…'”From: Friday 2 September 2005 —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Saturday 03 September 2005 @ 9:15 PM
05w35:1 …and blow your house down and drown Posted August 30th, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 35 number 1 (…and blow your house down and drown) ——————————————————————— Hurricane Katrina | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina “Hurricane Katrina, the remnants of which still exist as a powerful storm system, was a major tropical cyclone that caused significant damage in the southeastern part of the United States. Areas affected (so far) include southern Florida, Louisiana (especially the Greater New Orleans area), southern and central Mississippi, southern Alabama, the western Florida Panhandle, western Georgia and the Tennessee Valley region. Katrina is the eleventh named storm, fourth hurricane, and third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. Its minimum central pressure of 27.108 inches (918 mb) at the time of its Louisiana landfall makes it the third most intense system to strike the United States in recorded history. So far there have been at least 84 deaths, a number which will rise as casualty reports come in from areas that are currently inaccessible. It would be the deadliest hurricane in the United States since at least Hurricane Agnes in 1972, which killed 122. It is also estimated to be the costliest natural disaster in United States history.” Katrina Should be A Lesson To US on Global Warming | Spiegel Online http://tinyurl.com/9578t “Hurricane Katrina is big news for German commentators, whatever their ilk. For some, the powerful storm which slammed the Gulf Coast on Monday, is a symbol of the sort of environmental terrors awaiting the world thanks to global warming and proof positive that America needs to quickly reverse its policy of playing down climate change. For the more conservative, it is simply another regrettable natural catastrophe. […]The toughest commentary of the day comes from Germany’s Environmental Minister, Jürgen Trittin, a Green Party member, who takes space in the Frankfurter Rundschau, a paper owned by the Social Democrats, to bash US President George W. Bush’s environmental laxity. He begins by likening the photos and videos of the hurricane stricken areas to scenes from a Roland Emmerich sci-fi film and insists that global warming and climate change are making it ever more likely that storms and floods will plague America and Europe. ‘There is only one possible route of action,’ he writes. ‘Greenhouse gases have to be radically reduced and it has to happen worldwide. Until now, the US has kept its eyes shut to this emergency. (Americans) make up a mere 4 percent of the population, but are responsible for close to a quarter of emissions.’ He adds that the average American is responsible for double as much carbon dioxide as the average European.” Hurricane ‘will force consumers to reduce fuel use’ | Peter Klinger and Adam Sage http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9072-1757943,00.html “However, the International Energy Agency (IEA), a leading forecaster, and analysts advised against government intervention, saying that the $70 price could provide the much-needed jolt that would force consumers to reduce their oil consumption.The French Government was in disarray yesterday, with ministers squabbling over a proposal to cut the national speed limit to reduce fuel consumption.” Crisis Grows As Flooded New Orleans Looted | Adam Nossiter http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/08/30/D8CAGBA00.html “Helicopters dropped sandbags on two broken levees as the water kept rising in the streets. The governor drew up plans to evacuate just about everyone left in town. Looters ransacked stores. Doctors in their scrubs had to use canoes to bring supplies to blacked-out hospitals. New Orleans sank deeper into crisis Tuesday, a full day after Hurricane Katrina hit. ‘It’s downtown Baghdad,’ said tourist Denise Bollinger, who snapped pictures of looting in the French Quarter. ‘It’s insane.’ The mayor estimated that 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, while a countless number of residents were still stranded on rooftops.” ‘Our tsunami,’ Mississippi hurricane survivors say | Matt Daily http://tinyurl.com/74l7j “It was like our tsunami,’ Vincent Creel, a spokesman for the Mississippi Gulf Coast city of Biloxi, said on Tuesday. When Hurricane Katrina roared ashore on the U.S. Gulf Coast on Monday, it sent a 30-foot (9-meter) storm surge into Biloxi. Many people were probably trapped in their homes by the ferocious wall of water. ‘It’s going to be in the hundreds,’ said Creel, when asked how many people may have died. Police said around 30 people died in one Biloxi apartment complex alone when the storm surge brought it crashing down.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 30 August 2005 @ 11:32 PM
05w29:2 Letter from St. John's | London Bombings Posted July 21st, 2005 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 29 number 2 (Letter from St. John’s | London Bombings) Craig Francis Power has written me a couple of letters from St. John’s, the latest deals with the latest controversy with The Rooms and Gordon Laurin’s firing.Now, while the news channels today are creaming themselves about being able to devote another full day to the crumbs fed to them by the London police, we should remember that in the long run, visual culture and literature is where a society’s memory lies, and certainly not at the news desks of CBC and CNN, where they tell us that today’s bombing occurred two weeks after the first round. No shit. I wasn’t born yesterday. Goodreads began partially because of what I read by John Taylor Gatto in an autumn issue of Harper’s magazine a couple of years back: After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves. And that stayed with me. Then, last winter’s readings of John Ralston Saul drove the point home: “There is no reason to believe that large parts of any population wish to reject learning or those who are learned. People want the best for their society and themselves. The extent to which a populace falls back on superstition or violence can be traced to the ignorance in which their elites have managed to keep them, the ill-treatment they have suffered and the despair into which a combination of ignorance and suffering have driven them. […] It’s not that everyone must understand everything; but those who are not experts must see that they are being dealt with openly and honestly; that they are part of the process of an integrated civilization. They will understand and participate to the best of their ability. If excluded they will treat the elites with an equal contempt”. London Bombings Bombers in London are suffering from a lack of imagination, by which they can’t relate to society at large. I’m reminded of something Mark Kingwell wrote ten years ago discussing crime statistics in the U.S. and noting that for some the conditions of poverty were so severe that going to jail was a step up, guaranteeing shelter and three meals a day. (Such motivations have also led many people into the military over the past couple of centuries as well). One then begins to see that these suicide bombers are trying to escape their lives. And, as the media would like us to think – they all appear normal, aren’t in dire poverty. They always come across as a middle-class, albeit in some cases, lower middle class. Instead, we have a situation analogous to the suicides of Canada’s north, where the Inuit children, after years of sniffing gasoline for cheap and brain-destructive highs, are hanging or shooting themselves. We have a pretty good idea as to why those kids are self-destructive, and that is because ‘they have no culture’, the story being that the misguided intentions of a century ago to assimilate the native populations did terrible damage to their sense of self as a culture, and in effect, destroyed their imaginations. The imagination of themselves and their place in the world, in the grand scheme of things. And so, I want to say that suicide bombers are suffering from a lack of imagination. That they are choosing to die, and to escape into the paradisiacal world (the only thing, one imagines, that has preoccupied their imagination for years) rather than continuing to live their dreary, industrialized, modernist, post-modernist, (or whatever other name we throw at it) lives. Those of us who despise reality television and other aspects of pop culture choose do so because we feel that we have better things to occupy our imagination – great books, the art of contemporary galleries – ‘cinema’ as opposed to Hollywood blockbusters…. but if you’re a child of immigrants, and don’t identify either with your parents or fully with your peers, and instead your imagination is stimulated by religion …. it doesn’t seem to be so mysterious now does it, why these kids would do what they do. We imagine ourselves, develop ambitions, or at least have plans for the future – next vacation and so forth. Imagining ourselves and our place in the world is terribly important in helping give us a sense of context, and in carrying out our daily activities. Our love for stories feeds this sense of imagination – and we feel more alive when our life is echoed in the imagination – it is a resonance chamber by which we build symphonies of meaning. The Rooms The tension in St. John’s is one of two imaginative visions: an elite version (which I suppose would be Laurin’s camp) and one down-home version (the CEO’s camp). Now, admittedly, I’m not in St. John’s and am only working with what I’ve read (today’s links) but let’s look at it according to Saul’s take on elitism. I believe, as does Saul, that people want what’s best. That only seems like common sense. Yes, the elites, and especially art-elites, do form a sort of tribe which treats people outside of it with an element of contempt. They think they are engaged in what’s best. They think that the lobster-trap craft folk are uneducated and misguided and have the blinders on towards ‘what’s best’. Hence, tension. Ok, that being said, it does seem to me that Craig Power has a point where he writes, “Newfoundlanders have a reputation for being stupid, inbred and drunk. With the events of the past week and a half, is there any reason to wonder why?” having set it up by saying, “Wanda Mooney, a career government administrator, has been installed as interim director. … I don’t know what this woman’s knowledge of art history or contemporary art practice is, but I do know that if you Google her name, you find out that she used to be the woman you called if you wanted to rent space or book a reception at the old provincial gallery. How this qualifies her to run the gallery on even an interim basis, I don’t know, but I can hardly wait to see this visionary at work.” Perhaps that’s unfair. But the point here is that according to the attitude among artists in St. John’s, the Board of Directors and CEO are suffering from a lack of imagination, one that in itself is contemptuous of the public at large. One that assumes tourists want to travel to foggy and cold St. John’s to see a bunch of folk-art crap, when they could be treated to the best of what contemporary culture has to offer. But, the point I’m trying to make by bringing up London and my thoughts therein are that treating The Rooms with the contempt with which it has been treated, first by the Provincial Government, which kept it closed for a year, and now with Laurin’s dismissal, is stunting the imagination of Newfoundlanders, a place which so far has imagined itself as backward and victimized, and been rewarded by doing so by a Kevin Spacey movie. Laurin’s purported vision to give the citizens of St. John’s the quality of culture they deserve (that is, the best) and to resist mediocre crap, is admirable, and it’s unfortunate that another Maritime art scandal has resulted in the process. But here we also seem to be dealing with the backlash of ‘the excluded’ toward the elites (who have excluded by obscurantist writing and snotty attitudes for a century now) by treating them with ‘an equal contempt’. Let’s just say that nobody has a monopoly on the imagination, but London also illustrates that it’s important to foster the best imaginations society has to offer. -Timothy ——————————————————————— Letter from St. John’s 2 | Craig Francis Power http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/stjohns/ “In his brief tenure, Laurin had already formed alliances with Newfoundland and Labrador’s artist run centres, not to mention its experimental musicians, dancers and writers. There was a real sense of excitement amongst all of us. We actually believed that the provincial gallery, long a bastion for the cultural vacuity of Christopher Pratt (NL’s answer to Alex Colville), would begin to take contemporary art and artists more seriously. I, for one, feel like the biggest sucker in the world. […]Newfoundlanders have a reputation for being stupid, inbred and drunk. With the events of the past week and a half, is there any reason to wonder why?” Artists ‘mortified’ by sacking at St. John’s Rooms | CBC Arts http://tinyurl.com/97n5g “Newfoundland and Labrador’s arts community is ‘mortified and deeply embarrassed’ by the recent firing of Gordon Laurin as director of the province’s art gallery, according to an artists group.Gabrielle Kemp, director of communications of Visual Arts Newfoundland and Labrador (VANL), told CBC Arts Online her group is vexed by Laurin’s dismissal just two weeks after the province’s landmark art gallery, The Rooms, opened. “ Director’s exit stuns community | James Adams (G&M) http://tinyurl.com/b3n9e “Laurin was hired for the job just a little more than a year ago, following a lengthy search. A graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, he’d been director of Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery in Halifax since 1998. In the spring of 2004, it was expected that Laurin would be overseeing the move of the art collection into The Rooms, but that March the provincial government announced it was postponing the opening of the facility by a year, to June 29, 2005, to save an estimated $2-million.” Interview #2 | On the Go http://www.cbc.ca/onthego/media/20050718DEAN.ram “The Room’s is living up to it’s controversial beginnings. Remember the enormous fight over building on top of the Fort Townsend site. Now, within two weeks of our new provincial Museum, Archives and Art Gallery opening, the director of the Art Gallery has been sacked. Gordon Laurin, the now former director, will not comment. Dean Brinton is the CEO of the Rooms. He’s the man who fired him. Here’s part of what he had to say to the host of Weekend AM, Angela Antle.”Aired Friday, July 15, 2005 | Real Audio File Interview #3 | On the Go http://www.cbc.ca/onthego/media/20050719VANL.ram “When the news came out on Friday that Gordon Laurin, the director of our new Art Gallery in the Rooms was sacked, many people were shocked, if not outraged. Now the province’s visual artists are getting together, having meetings and making phone calls to find out what happened at the Rooms and what happens from here on in. VANL, The Visual Artists of Newfoundland and Labrador is an advocacy group for visual artists. That group held a meeting today, and then two of it’s members came by our studio. Elayne Greeley, is the chair of VANL’s advocacy committee. Tara Bryant is a member of the board. Ted began the conversation by asking Ms. Greeley what she’s learned since Friday about why Gordon Laurin was let go. Here’s what she said. Q: What is important about this dispute for the people who aren’t working artists, the people listening to us right now? A: Do they want a cultural institution that represents their culture in an accurate and in an informed way, or do they want a watered down version of programming and culture that is aimed at a less informed audience? An art gallery is a research institution as well as a space that presents work, right? So we’re talking about curating, we’re not talking just about a pretty space to hang artwork, we’re talking about representing the culture that has happened as well as presenting the culture that is existing now, and how it is going to move into the future’. [7.32/9.33] “Aired Monday, July 18, 2005 | Real Audio File —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 21 July 2005 @ 1:49 PM
